ITP Spring '22 → Energy → Kinetic Project

Kinetic project team members

Shuainan Yang
Shinnosuke Komiya
Shirley Wu

Last week we left off with the idea of a candle to a steam engine powering an LED and had ordered the cheapest and most minimal steam engine we could find because we didn't want to build it from scratch.

Best video we could capture of the rubber band on the stirling engine flywheel (right), there wasn't enough friction on the wheel to get the rubber band to turn a motor. Also the stirling engine was too weak to turn the motor we needed it to turn anyways.

Turns out, it was a stirling engine, which is conceptually a little different in that it works based on a temperature differencial between the top and bottom plate moving the piston, rather than pressure built up from steam moving the piston.

Unfortunately the stirling engine was really delicate and we couldn't extract any work from it (the right video above is us trying to put a rubber band on the wheel to use it to drive a motor, which failed).

So we decided to build it from scratch lol.

After watching a whole bunch of videos on Youtube, we determined that the must-haves for a steam engine were:

a candle for fire
a water vessel that can withstand fire, boiling temperatures and steam
a syringe to act as a piston
a lightweight flywheel

That lightweight flywheel would then get connected to a motor that would power an LED.

The array of DC and AC motors we borrowed from Tom to try (left), and the 5V DC motor that we thought had the most hope.

With the video knowledge in mind, we set out to acquire some copper tubing (husband's suggestion!) as a more reusable water vessel than the drink cans the Youtube videos used.

Really rough sketch of our steam engine parts and their dimensions.

We also acquired epoxy that could withstand up to 500°F heat to join our copper tubing (which are just fittings for plumbing lol) and secure it to silicone tubing (also high temperature safe) that we could attach to the plastic syringe (not high temperature safe) on the other side further away from the candle flame.